Ian Dunt

2 months ago | inews.co.uk | Ian Dunt

If you want a lesson on how infantile Britain’s constitutional conversation is, just take a look at what’s going on in the House of Lords. We should be experiencing a once-in-a-generation moment of reform. Instead, it’s dissolved in a pointless, juvenile shouting match of nothingness, just like it always does. A historic opportunity is being thrown away. Generally speaking, you get one chance for Lords reform every 30 to 40 years.

2 months ago | inews.co.uk | Ian Dunt

Over the past few days, we’ve started to see the first really big split in the Trump administration break out into the open. Peter Navarro, an empty-headed conspiracy theorist with dreams of economic literacy, is an architect of the tariff policy. Elon Musk, a Gen-X reject, is charged with setting fire to the American state. Morally, they are both as bad as each other. But ideologically, it turns out that there’s a distinction between them.

2 months ago | inews.co.uk | Ian Dunt

This might be the single stupidest thing any of us will ever see. It is stupid in every way: presentationally, intellectually, politically, methodologically, morally and of course economically. The word stupid doesn’t really suffice for the full level of idiocy we’ve now reached. It’s as if we’ve attained a new state of human mindlessness, a kind of species milestone. This is what empires look like when they fall: lost to mania, paranoia, jealousy and spasms of baseless rage.

2 months ago | inews.co.uk | Ian Dunt

There’s something deeply humiliating about this moment. Sometimes you wonder how much we can possibly take. It’s not clear how long Britain can tolerate being bullied, dismissed and belittled before we stand up for ourselves. International trade is not a place of high emotion. It’s supposed to be the site of cool, rational, calculated self-interest. But politics is a place of high emotion. Emotions matter. They define the way that governments are seen and whether they succeed.

2 months ago | iandunt.substack.com | Ian Dunt

The truth of the Marine Le Pen story is simple. She fucked around. She got found out. What did she actually do? You'd be hard pushed to find out, given that very few news outlets seem motivated to tell you. If you're really lucky, you'll get a brief mention of the court statements around paragraph 12, once all the populists got to have their say about how French democracy is being trampled over. So I'll tell you here, and I'll put it up top, above the digital fold, where it should be.